EVEN in an age of superlatives,
she continues as the ultimate superlative, a ship so huge
that she would comfortably swallow up Indias
largest ship, the 25,000-tonne aircraft carrier INS
Vikrant, in her holds. On land, at 485.46 metres from tip
to tip, she would dwarf the worlds tallest man-made
land structure, the 424-metre Petronas tower of Malaysia.
At sea she is fully 100 per cent bigger than the new
breed of competing super tankers like the ill-fated Exxon
Valdez.

Welcome
aboard the TT Jahre Viking, a ship so huge that when
fully laden she can not pass through the 32-mile-wide
English channel that separates England from France, what
to speak of the Suez and Panama canals. For, when laden,
she sits 24.6 metres in the water, a depth great enough
to deny her entry to most of the worlds major
ports.

But, perhaps, proving
the old adage that its lonely at the top, life
hasnt exactly been a bed of roses for this giant
which defies classification (in shipping parlance she has
been dubbed ULCC, an ultra large crude carrier). Built in
1979 for a Greek shipping magnate towards the fag-end of
the super tanker boom that followed the oil embargo of
1973, her original owner went bankrupt even before she
put out to sea. Following this her builders, the Japanese
conglomerate Sumitomo offered her to a Hong Kong owner.

But before taking
delivery, her new owner set an unusual condition. Already
massive at 480,000 tonnes, he ordered that her length be
increased several more metres to add another 87,000
tonnes to her load-carrying capacity to make her, at
564,763 tonnes, the largest ship to ever be built.

Two years later, in
1981, she was finally ready to be put to sea under the
name the Sea Wise Giant.

As the timing goes, her
launch was not without hassles. unfortuitous. Two major
oil-producing states of Iran and Iraq were locked in a
bitter war, and with the Arab world believed to be
bankrolling if not actually backing Iraq, any ship
carrying Iranian or Arab oil (in effect every tanker
playing the Persian Gulf, the source of most of the
worlds oil), was seen as a legitimate military
target by the other country.

Against this backdrop it
was too much to expect the Sea Wise Giant to sail without
hinderance. Still, for the first few years of her life
she plied her trade unmolested in the Gulf of Mexico,
even doubling as a storage tanker, ill fate propelled her
towards a more active duty in the Persian Gulf, and
transformed her into a sitting duck for would-be takers.

As expected, disaster
struck soon enough. While sailing the Hormuz Straits in
1986, she was targeted by Iraqi jets, who fired their
full complement of Exocet missiles into her hull. The Sea
Wise Giant never had a chance. Extensively damaged, she
sank in the shallow waters off Irans Kharg Island.

Here she would sit out
for the remainder of the war. And might have sat
indefinitely had it not been for her uniqueness and what
maritime assessors saw as her enduring value. The Sea
Wise Giant, or what remained of her, was bought by a
Norwegian company, re-floated, and towed to the Keppel
shipyard in Singapore. After major conversions and
repairs she was relaunched in 1991 as the TT Jahre
Viking, quite simply the largest ship that set sail
again.

But although she now
regularly sails into the sunset, parting the seas before
her as she goes, life is still not a bed of roses aboard
the Jahre Viking. To quote KPS Kang, a Chandigarh youth,
back after a stint as Chief Officer aboard her.
"When you work as Chief Officer on the worlds
biggest ship your responsibilities are bigger in every
sense of the word". In his case it meant looking
after cargo, discharge and maintenance of 46 tanks and
31,541 square metres of deck.

At sea, specially when
negotiating rocky straits and shallow waters, the need
for constant depth current monitoring is that much
greater. And at port, or what substitutes as port,
single-buoy moorings in the open sea or ship-to-ship
transfer of cargo entails a lot of risk. The risk of
accidents or spillage is much higher than with ships
working out of safe harbours.

In tacit recognition of
this and her sheer size, the Jahre Viking has been
designated in the class of worst-case
scenarios by the US Coast Guard, prompting strict
international monitoring and compensatory vigilance on
the part of her crew and a gobye to the occasional perk
like a Singapore sling to a setting tropical sun.
(Following the Exxon Valdez disaster off the coast of
Alaska blamed on its drunk captain, most tankers adopted
a no-alcohol policy).

Surprisingly, for a ship
her size, the Jahre Viking packs in a rather small crew
of 40, about the same number as aboard two Air India
Jumbos. And all of these are of non-Norwegian origin. In
fact, barring the occasional Russian junior officer, all
officers, including her captain, are Indians. The crew is
almost entirely Filipino.